Before I get to the announcement of the next Sydney Oracle Meetup, let me share the experience from the the Very First SOM that took place yesterday. I think I can sum it up as one word — awesome!

My schedule was a bit crazy recently and I was afraid I could forget something important under time pressure (it always happens to me). In the end, I did forget few things (like napkins and power adapter for my MacBook) but it was all resolved.

Thanks to Andre Araujo for helping me to carry some of the required “ingredients”. One of the attendees was there a bit early so we’d got additional help preparing the room (thanks Jack). As we just cracked the first beers and pizzas, people started arriving and we had nice 30 minutes of warm up.
I presented my session Under The Hood of Oracle Clusterware and it went quite well and even the demo worked so we didn’t get to the fun troubleshooting experience. I love when the audience is actively engaged and presentation is not “one-way” — lot’s of fun (and spare time to refill while someone else is talking). We had a nice break between two parts of the presentation and, instead of 10-15 minutes bio-break, it turned into 30 minutes of peers networking and, unfortunately, I had to interrupt it in order to continue. Note to myself, we should plan to have more free flowing discussions and also plan small meetups directly in a pub, maybe.

The right mix of drinks helped making the atmosphere warm and friendly. I think during these few hours everyone talked to each other participant. A group of 20 people is a great way to start such event — it’s big enough to make a crowd and small enough to talk to everyone.

My impression is that all attendees liked our new event and thoroughly enjoyed it. The early feedback from few members indicated the same. In fact, the best motivation I’ve had is that one of the members came to me with the personal donation to support the meetup. Thanks a lot — you know who you are!

But enough about the past…

I’m very pleased to announce our next meetup — “Sydney Oracle Meetup #2 — Performance, Performance, Performance“. I know many of you might be jealous that I live in Sydney but you would be even more jealous knowing who is going to present on 17th April at our Sydney Oracle Meetup — Tanel Poder (aka “new Steve Adams”) and Ric Van Dyke from Hotsos. Needles to say that SOM participation is why they are in Sydney in the first place and there few nice “side-effects” like doing advanced seminar for Oracle University and chilling out in the sun. ;-)

More details on the event page. If you are in Sydney — make sure you join Sydney Oracle Meetup and drop by to learn some interesting performance tuning quirks.